Counter-hagiography and counter-biography besmirch foundational figures held dear by different religious, political, or social groups. Such phenomena figure prominently in the history of religion and conflicts. For example, what we know of the Mazdakite revolution in pre-Islamic Iran/Iraq comes from revilers. The anti-Judaic polemicist from ninth-century Afghanistan and Iraq, Hiwi ("Snake"), was actually called yyawi (still a name among Iraqi Jews). The reputation of the great Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) thinker Moses Mendelssohn was damaged among the Orthodox by how Haskalah extremists portrayed him in their image. In 1869, a Genoan politician, Cesare Cabella, fulminated against Esther and Mordecai. In the Letter of Haman in rabbinic homiletics, Jews parodized hostile representations of their sacred history. Gerson Rosenzweig parroted in his 1892 talmudic-style Tractate America, anti-immigrant rhetoric from New York newspapers. Roman-age rabbis responded to claims about the protagonist of the Book of Joshua, "Joshua the Robber" as per a North African inscription early Byzantine Procopius of Caesarea alleged to have seen.

Auteur

Ephraim Nissan is a scholar with over 600 publications. Apart from his multidecade record as book series or journal editor, he has guest-edited thematic issues for journals more than twenty times, most recently a volume for the centennial of Berthold Laufer's Sino-Iranica on cultural exchanges involving Asia. His humanities research is interdisciplinary and addresses late antique, premodern, and recent cultures, mainly Jewish studies, but also Italian, folklore, humour studies, history of medicine, and more. Several more of his volumes (edited or authored) on the representation (either counter-biographical, or appropriative) of prominent characters across the religious divide are forthcoming with Palgrave.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern holds the Crown Family Chair in Jewish Studies at Northwestern University, where he teaches early modern, modern Jewish, and East European history. He has published seven books focusing on the socio-cultural, intellectual, and comparative literary history of Jews in Eastern Europe. His books and articles have appeared in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, French, Hebrew, Spanish, and German. He has served as a visiting professor in France, Poland, Germany, Israel, and Ukraine.